WING - Web IMAP/NNTP Gateway, version 0.11
Copyright (C) 1998, 1999 by Malcolm Beattie
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 1, or (at your option)
any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
General Public License or the Artistic License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License in
the file named "Copying". If not, you can get one by writing to the
Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
DESCRIPTION
WING is an Open Source Apache/mod_perl based system which allows users
to access email held on an IMAP server via any web browser.
WING provides a gateway so that users can access email held on an
IMAP server via any web browser. See
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~mbeattie/wing/
Some features of WING are:
* The browser does not need to support Java, JavaScript or frames
but table and cookie support are preferable.
* Users can create a hierarchy of multiple mailboxes and browse and
move messages between them.
* Messages with MIME attachments can be displayed nicely.
* Per user defaults (such as screen size and mail signature) can be
set and saved between sessions.
* Files local to the client browser can be included in composed
messages or MIME attached to them.
* Arbitrary headers can be added to composed messages except that the
"From:" header cannot be changed or forged for outgoing messages
from WING.
* WING is scalable up to thousands and tens of thousands of users.
* Users can import address books by uploading them via their browser
(only Pine format address books supported in this version).
* Users can create their own links (bookmarks), presented in a
hierarchical list which can be folded/unfolded.
* Users can login using a "portal" view which provides a frame down
the left hand side of the browser containing site-configurable
links along with their personal links. This is the only part of
WING which requires frame support from the browser.
When integrated with a mail cluster similar to the one we have here
at Oxford University, WING also has these features:
* Users can manage their account via the WING interface. This includes
changing passwords, querying disk usage of mailboxes and disk quota
an setting mail forwarding and "vacation" messages.
* Users can create address books which can be browsed, searched and
shared in an ACL controlled manner with chosen lists of other
users and groups.
* WING server nodes can be added or removed transparently and can be
taken down for upgrades without affecting user service.
* There are a few web-based admin tools for querying the status of
the WING cluster and its users.
REQUIREMENTS
In its current state, WING requires many other pieces of software to
function. Future versions may be easier to install, configure and
maintain but this one requires the attention of an experienced system
administrator familiar with Apache/mod_perl, Perl and SQL databases.
It was also developed primarily for Linux. Although almost all of it
is portable, if you're running it on something other than Linux you'll
at least need to edit Wing/Login.pm and write a new version of
make_session_id() that gets *cryptographically* strongly random numbers
by some other means than simply reading /dev/urandom. (Don't just use
rand() or a PRNG--that sort of randomness isn't suitable. If you don't
understand why not, get someone else to do the port. Getting it wrong
will open up a security hole.)
For configuring a mail cluster and its associated features, the
administrator will also need to know about network configuration,
firewalling, NFS, automount, named and exim. You have been warned.
AVAILABILITY
Wing is available from your favourite CPAN site as a tar ball
modules/by-authors/id/S/SI/SIMON/Wing-0.11.tar.gz
its home site in tar.gz form
ftp://ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/perl/Wing-0.11.tar.gz
INSTALLATION
These instructions are probably woefully incomplete and inaccurate.
I'll assume there are three logically separate hosts: a frontend, an
IMAP server and a WING server. If necessary, those can all be the
same physical host (or there can be multiple hosts in each class).
If they are all the same host then WING will, in the current
configuration, still access user mailboxes by using loopback IMAP
connection to itself. It is possible to make WING access mail files
directly in this case but it needs changes to WING which I won't go
into here. Now start installing things:
On the frontend and the WING server install Apache, mod_perl,
Perl 5.004_04 (or later) and the following Perl modules:
DBD-Pg
DBI
Data-Dumper
Net-Telnet
Apache-DBI
MD5
MIME-Base64
Term-ReadKey
HTML-Parser
Term-ReadLine-Perl
libnet
IO-stringy
CrackLib
Mail-Cclient
libwww
MailTools
MIME-tools
Net-DNS
SQL
Most of these are standard CPAN modules, a couple are modules
I've written but not officially released yet (CrackLib and SQL).
All are available in RPM form at
ftp://ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/linux/SRPMS/
for the source RPMs and
ftp://ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/linux/RPMS/i386
for binary RPMs built on Red Hat 5.x for x86. Those who can't cope
directly with RPMs will, for the moment, have to get rpm2cpio and
build them themselves. I will get around to releasing these modules
to CPAN sometime. SQL has bugs involving string/number quoting but
should work OK the way WING uses it.
The CPAN bundle Bundle::WING will help you download and install
these modules.
On the frontend, install PostgreSQL. You may be able to use another
SQL database, but
(1) it must support transactions (this rules out MySQL unless
someone rewrites Wing::Login in a way which doesn't require
transactions).
(2) it must support using ident lookups for authentication (or else
you will have to tweak the DBI connection setup).
Create a database for wing. I'll assume that Apache runs under the
username "httpd". Create database users "httpd" and "root". Note
that PostgreSQL user root really is root (uid 0) and *not* the
PostgreSQL "superuser" username (often "postgres").
Initialise the necessary database tables with the SQL from
wing-init.sql (run as username httpd)
abook-init.sql (run as username httpd)
users-init.sql (run as username root)
Each user who wants to use wing should have a row in the users
table which includes their username, uid, gid and sender. The
"sender" field is what WING will put in the "From: " header of
outgoing messages that the user sends with WING. If using
PostgreSQL, after adding a number of users to the users table
don't forget to "vacuum analyze users" so that it realises it
should make use of index lookups. Also, give each user a personal
address book
insert into abook_ids (username, tag) values ('fred', 'personal');
Start up the maild daemon under the httpd username. An appropriate
init.d boot time script is wing.init which can be copied to
/etc/rc.d/init.d/maild (or wherever you keep boot time scripts). If
you don't have a SysV flavoured boot configuration, tweak it yourself.
Install Wing. If you use the RPM, fine. If you're not you'll have to:
* copy Wing.pm Outline.pm Wing/*.pm to your Perl site_perl directory
* copy wing-icons/* to the wing-icons subdirectory of your Apache
root directory
* copy help/* to the wing-help subdirectory of your Apache root
* install maild in /usr/sbin (or wherever your boot time script
wants to find it)
* create directories /var/lib/maild and /var/lib/maild/sessions,
owned by httpd and mode 700.
Now the difficult part: edit .../site_perl/Wing/Shared.pm and go
through changing things to refer to your own hostnames, domains and
environment. Some things will need changing, most won't. The various
variables are reasonably well commented.
Edit your Apache httpd.conf and check you're running under user httpd
and group httpd. On the WING server only edit access.conf and add
PerlModule Wing
SetHandler perl-script
PerlHandler Wing
SetHandler perl-script
PerlHandler Wing::Login
Alias /wing-icons/ /home/httpd/wing-icons/
On the frontend, edit access.conf and add
PerlModule Wing::Balance
#
# Using below means the root directory of this web
# server (or, typically, virtual host) brings up a login screen
# for wing. This means users can just type a simple hostname into
# their browser for wing access. If you don't want this and can't
# spare a virtual host, change it to something like
# so that they have to type
# http://foo.bar.baz/wing-login into their browsers to get at WING.
#
SetHandler perl-script
PerlHandler Wing::Balance
#
# *** Add auth restrictions here to limit the people who can
# *** use the admin interface to query wing.
#
SetHandler perl-script
PerlHandler Wing::Admin
Now create a file called /etc/wing.live on the frontend and put in
it, one per line, the hostnames of each WING server. You can comment
out lines by putting "#" at the beginning of the line.
Restart Apache on the frontend and WING server(s).
Right, that might just about be it. Try using a browser to
connect to http://yourfrontend.example.org/ (or .../wing-login
if you chose that Location above) and see what happens. If something
goes wrong, investigate and try to fix it. Don't mail me directly.
Some of the features (those above that I mentioned required the
extra cluster configuration) may not work. I don't yet have
instructions yet for how to set all that up but you can always look
at the source and figure it out for yourself if you're adventurous.
SUPPORT
There isn't any official support. There is however a mailing list
called "wing-admin" where those who use WING or want to set up WING
can discuss things. I monitor that mailing list and help where I can.
The list is a majordomo list. To subscribe, send the following message
*body* (the subject line is irrelevant and ignored)
subscribe wing-admin
to majordomo@maillist.ox.ac.uk. To unsubscribe again send the message
body "unsubscribe wing-admin" to the same address. To send messages to
the list, mail to wing-admin@maillist.ox.ac.uk.
Good luck. You'll need it. It is rather good when it all works though.
AUTHOR
Malcolm Beattie
mbeattie@sable.ox.ac.uk
Version 0.6, first public release
5 February 1999
Version 0.8, second public release
1 June 1999
Version 0.9
3 August 1999
Version 0.11
23 August 2001